Came here to say this. The right solution to this is still the same as it always was - teach the juniors what good code looks like, and how to write it. Over time, they will learn to clean up the LLM’s messes on their own, improving both jobs.
Someone bedridden is not the focus of the article or conversation; once you are no longer capable of being active, it is obviously true that you’ll partake in more sedentary activities.
If you let it, sure. But I don't go into a session asking 'what should I write.' Rather, I ask it to help fight me on my ideas, so that I can stress-test the logic behind them, which is precisely what I do with humans too.
Only with humans, it's admittedly way more fun. :)
I've worked corporate jobs all my life, and I was never one misunderstood message away from being fired. Instead they would've talked to me and, even if they figured it was my fault, they would've given me a warning since it was the first time. No worthwhile employer is firing people for the first offense, corporate or otherwise.
> I've worked corporate jobs all my life, and I was never one misunderstood message away from being fired.
100% you have been, you just didn't understand nor send the wrong message.
As a sidenote, working for a Corporation is not solely the bar for what people mean when they say working for Corporate. "Corporate" implies a larger organization that promotes policies developed under different circumstances to your work environment which minimizes liability and promotes homogeneity in all aspects of the working experience.
> 100% you have been, you just didn't understand nor send the wrong message.
Sure, there are thousands of messages I can come up with that would be immediately fireable; but that’s true anywhere, not just in corporate life, and is thus a strawman.
I have worked plenty of corporate jobs; Morgan Stanley, KBC Financial Products, Apple, Synopsys, the intelligence community (not corporate, but just as bad).
Never once was I "one misunderstood message" away from getting canned. I would have quit immediately if that were true. I understand not everyone can quit, but more people can than do.
Nobody deserves to work under that kind lack of of psychological safety, and certainly anyone on Slack and not in a factory has more of a choice.
I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch.
I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.
(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)
I can relate to the inclination, but so many new insights and moments of inspiration are necessarily confined to that painstaking iterative line-by-line process of real writing. When you are simply prompting and editing, you will fill the page (and it might even sound like “you”), but you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
I think you missed my point. I don't go back and have AI re-edit my drafts, on average. I have it give me some words that are on a page so I can say 'this sucks' and engage in writing myself, as opposed to continuing to stare at a blank page.
The quality of the AI's writing actually doesn't matter, for me, as much as it might for others, as a result. I write my own stuff. I just find AI helpful to activate me to do it.
>but you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
I feel like you haven't used LLMs very extensively if that is your genuine experience with LLMs.
Without even tuning the heat to a higher setting, a wide range of LLMs have offered me unique content that I had not encountered previously and certainly was not expecting.
There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM. I get more insights refining a draft through prompts than I ever did writing because there's more of it. The end stage of that process rarely sees the light of day because the artifact wasn't the point.
For writing as thinking with trouble starting from scratch, LLMs are the most important technology to emerge in my lifetime. Microblogging filled that gap in a way, but it had too many downsides.
>> you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
> There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM.
There may be, though. The LLM's initial output may anchor your thinking in insidious ways that may not be obvious at all especially since you're feeling productive. I bet the lack of confidence around starting would also increase over time every time you use an LLM to get over the hump.
I'm not talking about using a default mode LLM with LinkedIn Standard Obsequious Bullshit as a conversational imperative that emerges from simple prompts interacting with the heaviest weights. It pushes back because I told it to and it has redirects around common LLM failure modes, and modes unique to how I use them. That's in a set of instructions I've had a bunch of different models tear apart so I could put it back together better.
I treat it and describe it as a language coprocessor, not a buddy. The instructions are the kernel I boot it with.
Yeah, precisely. My "Bobby" knows my voice, but is not me, and is bad at using it. It is aware of all the tropes, and I've built a writing skill that describes, in great detail, how I write. I have also set it up to challenge me, not make me feel good.
Moreover, it's not like I spend my entire writing time arguing with an LLM, lol. I spend more time writing myself and/or doing research on the internet without an LLM, because sometimes they still get things wrong.
> I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch.
As someone who also has ADHD, I would beg you to reconsider this strategy.
Getting the first thoughts down on paper is the hardest part, especially for those who may have trouble with focus, but that's exactly why you should practice it!
It's 90% of the task, it's where you have to practice executive function to plan what you're going to write in the overall broad sense. Please don't give up on it and hand that task over to the LLMs There are a lot of strategies you can use to break through that barrier and you'll be better off by strengthening that muscle instead of leaving it to wither.
adhd'er here too. maybe the practice is good, but it takes a lot of energy, which is finite. i find that leaning on my strengths gets me far, far better results than trying to get up to par with everyone else on things im bad at. if a tool just lets you get started, and you can breeze through getting started on things that you might otherwise just never even start, it seems like using the tool is the way to go.
ive been fighting the way my brain works my whole life, and only recently have i switched to trying to work with the way it wants to work. i get so many more things done that are important to me, and i get them done without the implicit "i need to flagellate myself with this thing i hate because there is something wrong with me" that comes with those fights.
and yeah, the ai's come with their own problems. but the trade is so exponentially in the direction of being worth it. even just the being a decent rubber duck aspect of them can keep me on a task when i would never otherwise hope to see it through.
It is not 90% of the task. If it was, a first draft would be 90% of the task of writing, and it never has been. You write a first draft so you can get to the editing portion.
I can do it. It's not like I'm not capable. I've spent 38 years 'strengthening that muscle', heh.
But I also have an automatic car, even though I know how to drive stick.
Tools are tools, and how you use them is the important part.
For me, the issue of getting words on paper isn't focus, but an inability to decide how I want to start a page; it's decision paralysis. Whatever an LLM writes is going to be crappy, because it isn't me, but seeing it immediately gives me guidance as to what I want to say, because I have something to respond to as opposed to just being in my head.
Same, it's the push that gets the ball rolling down the hill.
>clearly expressing what I mean
I have use for it here too - I use it like a "power thesaurus" when I've got the feeling that the word I have doesn't have quite the right connotation, or to test out different versions of rephrasing something when I feel it could flow better or be clearer but I can't quite get my finger on it. But I don't just take output and paste it, I use it like a pair programmer for writing, where I'm the driver and the AI is the observer.
Neat! Similar to how I use it, but I find looking for the right word to be a lot of mental fun, so I don’t use it for that purpose as much. But yeah, “pair programmer for writing” is exactly right.
Yes this is my use-case for it too - it's great to generate a structure which I will keep but I always end up reworking all the actual content so it sounds like me. It is a great way to get past the 'getting started' hurdle though.
You're the first articulating my exact use case with AI as well! It really helps get me in 'the zone'. I actually now dictate as well and then the AI rewrite it and then I start editing. To lower the barrier even more.
Yeah, I've used dictation at times for the same reason.
I don't like how LLMs write. I like how I write.
But I do like that LLMs get me to write. People seem to miss that a lot, because most of the "AI slop" you see is AI-driven, not human-driven. But human-driven writing, with AI as a tool, is a far better way to go about it, imho.
Have you tried free/automatic writing? I don't know what the term is actually, but just stream of consciousness, putting words to paper, zero filter or pause, straight from the brain.
I usually start with "I don't know what to write but" and then just don't let myself stop. I have to keep putting words down, only rule.
It sometimes starts or turns gibberish, but eventually I hit a flow and real stuff starts to come out, and then I'm just writing.
I've seen the concept applied to art/drawing as well. I highly recommend trying!
Quick edit while I can: after googling this there's a lot of woo/spiritual stuff about it. I don't really subscribe to that, I just think it's a great tool to get out of your head and enter the flow state of writing, when it feels inaccessible.
Most of my best short stories were written precisely this way. For creative writing, I find that works really well.
I also do a version of this now, which is simply record myself speaking extemporaneously about the ideas I want to write about. It’s all in my head, so speaking it out loud (or writing) helps me organize my thoughts. Then I take that recording, shove it into an LLM, and have it turn it into sentences with punctuation, without changing meaning.
Inevitably, it sucks, but gives me a starting point.
Of course it did. War is hard, and lots of people die in it. The parent comment said always. I am saying that always is not true. I made no suggestions it was easy.
“Any legal use” is an exceptionally broad framework, and after the FISA “warrants,” it would appear it is incumbent on private companies to prevent breaches of the US constitution, as the government will often do almost anything in the name of “national security,” inalienable rights against search and seizure be damned.
If it isn’t written in the contract, it can and will be worked around. You learn that very quickly in your first sale to a large enterprise or government customer.
Anthropic was defending the US constitution against the whims of the government, which has shown that it is happy to break the law when convenient and whenever it deems necessary.
Note: I used to work in the IC. I have absolutely nothing against the government. I am a patriot. It is precisely for those reasons, though, that I think Anthropic did the right thing here by sticking to their guns. And the idiotic “supply chain risk” designation will be thrown out in court trivially.
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